patent

There is a lot of fuss over foldable devices and their flexible, bendable screens but those aren't the only new things in town. LG kicked things off last year with the LG V50 ThinQ Dual Screen and sometime later this year we'll finally see the Surface Duo and, later on, the Surface Neo in the wild. One problem with the latter dual screen implementations, however, is the hinge that bridges and at the same time divides the two screens. It seems that Microsoft may have an idea on how to turn this liability into a potential strength.

It may not be long before we see the iMac sporting a dramatic redesign. New Apple patent filings point to a potential iMac that's made almost entirely out of a single sheet of glass, which would be a big departure from the iMac we're familiar with today. Obviously, there's no guarantee that Apple will actually pursue such a design in a mass market product, but the fact that patent filing exists does indicate that it's something Apple has considered.

As the virtual reality industry appears to be moving away from mobile VR, it seems that phone manufacturers are looking to augmented reality to fill the gap. Apple is said to be working on its own set of AR glasses, and if a new design patent is anything to go on, it appears that Samsung is too. We even get a look at Samsung-official render in this design patent, leaving little to the imagination when it comes to what these AR glasses might look like.

Yesterday, Sony confirmed a lot of new details about the PlayStation 5, perhaps most importantly stating that the console will be out in time for the holiday 2020 season. While Sony has been mostly quiet on its plans for VR in the future, it looks like the PlayStation 5 might have an accompanying next-generation PSVR coming along with it.

On-screen keyboards have become a fact of life but that doesn't make them enjoyable to use. That's especially true for tablets that have large screens that would have been more comfortable to use with larger and more spacious keys. Typing on flat glass with nothing but subtle vibrations of the entire screen will always feel unnatural for some people. Apple's newest patent may offer screen typists a reprieve, that is if it ever becomes and actual implementation.

The most recent rumor on the next big smartphone release from Samsung is that it'll sport a spectrometer. A spectrometer is a sensor that's capable of detecting the physical makeup of an object based on its reaction to a beam of light. This isn't the first time one of these sensors has been on a phone - but it's likely the first time any phone with a spectrometer could realistically end up in your pocket.

What if you could design products with little thought for market viability or sometimes even technical feasibility? What if you had near limitless freedom to dream big? While patents still need to be grounded on reality, they're often an opportunity to put big ideas on paper, no matter how mind-boggling they may sound. Samsung has definitely had its fair share of odd patents but this triple screen patent filed by Samsung Display probably takes the cake in terms of strangeness and head-scratching.

The stylus is one of the understated input devices of modern times. Ridiculed by the late Steve Jobs, it has now become the star of Apple's new iPad Pro vision. Still, there only so many things you could cram inside a small stick. Wacom put buttons, Apple places a touch sensor, and Samsung added a Bluetooth transmitter. Microsoft's latest patent, however, definitely takes the cake by envisioning how its future Surface Pen could have not just buttons or radios but a while touch screen panel on its side.

Despite Samsung's blunder, the promise of foldable phones still has some appeal, depending on who you ask. There's still some debate on whether outies are better than innies, especially with future of Huawei's Mate X still in question. Its design, however, may be getting a show of support from OPPO but with a bit of a twist. The Chinese OEM's latest patent shows an outward-folding design that, unlike Huawei's is really almost all screen thanks to an elevating camera.

Despite having become a smartphone maker itself, Google hasn't been one to quickly jump on trends. It still has one camera on the Pixel's back and when it did adopt the notch, it did so in a rather ridiculous manner. So it was quite surprising to find out that it had worked with Samsung to make Android more foldable-friendly. It turns out, it might also be thinking about foldable phones after all.

Huawei is not one shrug off some of the more eccentric trends in smartphone design, although it mostly lets its Honor sub-brand do the experimenting. That doesn't mean, however, that it isn't playing with some ideas of its own. A recently published patent, for example, reveals a rather curious way to get rid of some, but not all, bezels and cutouts, using a second display that's just large enough for taking selfies and not much else.

Once hulking boxes that sat on top of sturdy wooden or metal cabinets, TVs have become so slim that they could be hung on and disappear into walls. But while the super thin and bezel-less frames make them look like they're embedded into walls, the one thing that breaks the illusion are the wires and cables that dangle out of these modern TVs. Samsung might be toying with a solution to that problem and, no, it won't involve a not-so-invisible One Invisible Connection.